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TipRanks
Analysts Say These 3 Dividend Stocks Are Top Picks for 2021
The market pendulum has been swinging from one extreme to the other recently, making a difficult environment for investors to track. The ups and downs of the fast-changing situation are the exact opposite of what investors want to see. What investors would most like to see, of course, are returns. And whether the markets are up or down, following the analysts’ ‘top picks’ makes a viable investment strategy. The Wall Street pros can do the footwork, and their published reports can inform our market decisions, acting as a set of guideposts for investors. We’ve opened up the TipRanks database to take a closer look at three of these ‘top picks.’ These are all names providing dividends, a sure-fire way to ensure a steady income no matter what direction the market is heading in. If that’s not enough, all three received enough support from Wall Street analysts to earn a “Strong Buy” consensus rating. Ellington Financial (EFC) We’ll start in the financial sector, where Ellington Financial inhabits the real estate investment trust niche. Ellington puts its energies into a wide range of real estate activities, including commercial and residential mortgage loans, equity investments, and mortgage-backed securities. The company uses a series of risk management tools to mitigate the natural risks of mortgage-backed securities, and ensure profits for investors. Ellington’s recent quarterly report, for 4Q20, showed the third consecutive increase in EPS, which was up 38% from Q3 to reach $1.44. For the full-year 2020, EPS came in at 39 cents per common share, down 15% yoy, on net income of $17.2 million. Like most REITs, Ellington pays out a regular dividend – and Ellington has been able to maintain regular dividend payments throughout the corona crisis year, despite a cut at the height of the panic. The most recent declaration, made in early February for a March 25 payout, was for 10 cents per common share, the same as the last three payments. The company pays out the dividend monthly, and has been increasing it gradually after last year’s cut. The current payment gives a yield of 7.5%. In his coverage of Ellington, Maxim analyst Michael Diana writes, “EFC’s equity is allocated 85% to credit assets, and almost all have done well. Of particular note are non-QM loans and reverse mortgage loans. Not only has demand for these credit classes been high, but EFC also has material equity stakes in the companies that originate these loans; thus, EFC profits twice. With smaller mortgage companies going out of business during the pandemic, competition has decreased, leading to favorable pricing.” At the bottom line, Diana says simply, “EFC remains our top pick under our mortgage REIT (mREIT) coverage.” To this end, Diana rates EFC a Buy and his $19 price target suggests a one-year upside of ~20%. (To watch Diana’s track record, click here) There is general agreement on Wall Street that EFC is a quality investment, and the analyst consensus rating shows that: it is a unanimous Strong Buy, based on 4 recent reviews. The shares are priced at $15.77, and their average target is $17.25, implying a 9% upside potential from current levels. (See EFC stock analysis on TipRanks) OneMain Holdings (OMF) Sticking with the financial sector, but in services rather that REITs, we’ll take a look at OneMain Holdings. This company’s subsidiaries offer a range of financial services, including consumer finance and insurance, to a customer base that normally gets neglected by the mainstream finance industry: retail customers who lack access – for whatever reason – to the regular banking and credit financing industry. The importance of this market segment should not be ignored, and OneMain showed that in fiscal year 2020 by bringing in $4.4 billion in total revenue. Closing out the 2020 calendar year, OneMain reported $1.23 billion in top line revenue for Q4 and $2.67 in earnings per share. While revenues were flat sequentially, EPS was up 43% from the previous quarter – and up 39% year-over-year. Like EFC, OneMain pays out a dividend – but unlike the REIT, OneMain uses a unique supplemental dividend policy. Each second and fourth quarter, the company pays out its minimum dividend per common share – but in the first and third quarters, it adds a one-time supplement to the payment. The minimum payment is currently set at 45 cents per common share; the last common share dividend paid, on February 25, was for $3.95. Analyst Michael Kaye, of Wells Fargo, is impressed with OneMain, and doesn’t hold back in his comments on the company: “We believe OMF is one of the best stories in consumer finance and that it is surprisingly still under the radar of many financial investors. OMF is a unique excess capital return story, in our view, and we expect $8.30 of dividends to be paid in 2021 which would equate to a 14.5% dividend yield. We also view the new credit card initiative positively as it should drive incremental growth, add value to their franchise, leverage their underwriting, distribution and servicing capabilities. OMF remains our top pick in our coverage.” Kaye rates OMF shares an Overweight (i.e. Buy) and his $65 price target implies an upside of 34% over the course of the next year. (To watch Kaye’s track record, click here) It’s not often that the analysts all agree on a stock, so when it does happen, take note. OMF’s Strong Buy consensus rating is based on a unanimous 10 Buys. The stock’s $63.60 average price target suggests a 31% upside from the current share price of $94. (See OMF stock analysis on TipRanks) Devon Energy (DVN) For the last ‘top pick’ stock we’re looking at here, we’ll switch over to the energy industry. Devon Energy, with a market cap of $15 billion, owns mineral rights – that is, the right to explore and drill – on 1.8 million acres in Texas and in adjacent areas of Oklahoma and New Mexico. This is one of North America’s most productive oil regions, and in recent years, the output here helped make the US a net exporter of fossil fuels. Devon also controls production areas in the mountain state of Wyoming. All told, Devon has over 10,000 wells in active use and an estimated 752 million ‘barrels of oil equivalent’ worth of proven reserves. In the fourth quarter of 2020, Devon showed a series of strong performance metrics. Production averaged 333,000 barrels of oil equivalent daily, boosted by a 7% quarter-over-quarter increase in crude oil output. Operations yielded a cash flow of $773 million for the quarter, of which $263 million was free cash flow. In conjunction with the earnings report, Devon announced a regular dividend payment of 11 cents per share, along with an additional variable dividend of 19 cents per share. Both are payable on March 31. Scotiabank’s Paul Cheng reiterates his decision to make Devon a top pick, writing, “We still see significant fundamental upside despite the YTD outperformance and the stock now trading at >4x its 2020 trough… We see little reason to expect that relevance, size, liquidity, etc concerns will prevent the stock from re-rating higher. As the company continues to deliver attractive fundamental results and execute on its shareholder-friendly strategy in the coming months and years, we expect DVN to outperform as the market gains further appreciation for the story and begins to more fully reflect these fundamentals in the share price.” Cheng’s Outperform (i.e. Buy) rating is supported by a $30 price target implying a 12-month upside potential of 31%. (To watch Cheng’s track record, click here) Overall, there are 19 recent stock reviews of Devon Energy, and they break down 17 to 2 in favor of Buys versus Holds, making the analyst consensus rating a clear Strong Buy. DVN is selling for $22.83 per share, and the average price target of $24.89 suggests ~9% upside from that level. (See DVN stock analysis at TipRanks) To find good ideas for dividend stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks’ Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks’ equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.
Every week over 1 billion people connect with businesses on our messaging apps. Many of these conversations are made possible by the thousands of developers who build innovative and engaging experiences on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Since opening access to our Llama family of large language models, we’ve seen lots of momentum and innovation with more than 30 million downloads to date. As our messaging services continue to evolve, we believe the technology from Llama and other generative AI models have the potential to enhance business messaging through more natural, conversational experiences.
At Connect Meta announced that developers will be able to build third-party AIs – a term we use to refer to our generative AI-powered assistants – for our messaging services.
We’re making it easy for any developer to get started, so we’re simplifying the developer onboarding process and providing access to APIs for AIs that make it possible to build new conversational experiences within our messaging apps.
All developers will be able to access the new onboarding experience and features on Messenger in the coming weeks. For WhatsApp, we’ll be opening a Beta program in November – if you’re interested in participating please sign up to the waitlist here to learn more.
We’ll keep everyone updated as we make these tools available to more developers later this year. We look forward to your feedback and seeing what you create.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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